The film-maker and dramatist Jean Cocteau, who, along with Jean Renoir, asked Chanel to design costumes for him, said that “she worked in fashion according to rules that would seem to have value only for painters, musicians, poets”. Chanel’s circle extended well beyond the worlds of film and fashion, however, with Picasso, Stravinsky and the founder of the Ballets Russes, Sergei Diaghilev, counted among her friends. Amid these great Modernist figures, this tiny but formidable woman moved and shook — and how she